Healey, Dan. "Stalinist Homophobia and the “Stunted Archive”: Challenges to Writing the History of Gay Men’s Persecution in the USSR." Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 151–176. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 31 May 2021. .

Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 31 May 2021, 15:59 UTC.

Access provided by: Universitäts & Stadtbibliothek Koln

Copyright © Dan Healey 2018. All rights reserved. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without prior permission in writing from the publishers. 7

Stalinist Homophobia and the “Stunted Archive”:

Challenges to Writing the History of Gay Men’s Persecution in the USSR

The use of political terror against homosexual men in the USSR began as a specifi c feature of Stalinism. During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin and his Politburo colleagues enthusiastically welcomed the use of secret police repression against so-called “pederasts,” and embedded homophobic terror in their system of rule. So integral was homophobic prejudice to the system that Stalin built, that after his death in 1953, Soviet authorities thought it was entirely natural to continue persecuting homosexuals. In fact, they “renewed the struggle against sodomy,” modernizing and expanding systems of police surveillance that remained in place to the end of the Soviet Union. Despite this apparently straightforward story of persecution, great diffi culties exist in documenting, interpreting, and explaining this history. Historians trying to chronicle political terror against Soviet homosexuals work with extremely diffi cult, but interesting, challenges. The anti-sodomy law of 1933–4 was adopted with an unusually high degree of secrecy, especially when compared with other Stalin laws that punished aspects of social life such as petty theft, abortion, or juvenile crime. Sources about Soviet terror against homosexuals remain carefully concealed, thanks to document-production practices of the 1930s, and later archival classifi cation. Under Stalin, there was an unwritten taboo on speaking in government documents about homosexuality. This taboo went beyond the convention of using euphemisms for heterosexual sexuality found in Stalin-era documents. Only in secret police fi les and in occasional high- level Party correspondence intended for a tiny readership was homosexuality explicitly discussed. While

151 152 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI state and Party archives in the Russian Federation reveal a great deal about state terror, very little of the material that these archives made available to researchers after 1991 discusses homosexuals as victims. Fuller and freer access to the archives of the Federal Security Service (FSB , successor to the Soviet KGB ), and the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation ( APRF, the “Presidential Archive”) is essential before historians can fi ll in this historical “blank spot” of the Stalin era. Defi ning “political terror” and other forms of state persecution is not simple for historians of the USSR . Types of state violence against populations varied enormously over the seventy-four years of the Soviet regime, and involved a spectrum of measures from summary execution without trial, to sentencing to the Gulag system of forced labor camps, and forced deportation and exile in “special settlements.”1 Under Stalin, the regime framed these measures in its ideology variously: as deliberate and supposedly “planned” population transfers and restructuring to facilitate projects like the collectivization of agriculture; as preventative forms of social and national cleansing to make cities “socialist” or to secure border regions; and as punishment for imagined or genuine anti-Soviet treachery. 2 Some forms of terror, such as the mass executions and imprisonments under the infamous secret police Order No. 00447 of July 30, 1937, which launched the “Great Terror” of 1937–8, were obviously “political” in the commonly accepted sense – that is, directed from the Kremlin by Stalin and the Party elite against specifi c categories of political “offenders.” 3 There were other forms of state terror that did not begin with orders from the top leadership, but which emerged from secret police activities and proposals. 4 The adoption of a law against male homosexuals in 1933–4 was apparently one of those police initiatives. Despite its origins at this time in the increasingly intrusive surveillance and population categorization practices of the secret police, the Stalinist anti-sodomy law quickly acquired a politicized justifi cation in Soviet ideology. Moreover, our knowledge of how police monitored, arrested, and imprisoned homosexuals during Stalin’s rule, and after his death, is also very limited. It is a symptom of the silence in the available archives that weighty recent studies of Stalin’s policing fail to say anything about roundups of homosexuals in Soviet cities as the new anti-sodomy statute was adopted. 5 Accounts of wartime and postwar policing say nothing about the persecution of male homosexuals. 6 What is more, for the years after 1953, we do not know anything about what political decisions were taken about the status of the homosexual. Who made the decisions? In which state or party body? When? On what rationale? We know very little about how the KGB interacted with the regular police (the “militia”) when dealing with homosexuals. We do not know which agencies gave the orders for infamous Brezhnev-era arrests under the anti-sodomy law that had a political dimension: those of fi lm director Sergei Paradzhanov, in 1974; poet Gennady Trifonov in 1976; and archaeologist Lev Klein in 1981. We do not have an accurate and full count of the numbers of men sentenced under the anti- STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 153 sodomy law. (Between 25,688 and 26,076 men were convicted of sodomy offenses between 1933 and 1991 in the USSR , but these fi gures include no statistics for twenty-two years of the period and include no secret police statistics. The likely total is probably something approaching 60,000.) 7 Would- be historians of the Communist state’s repression of homosexuality, whether for the Stalin era or the late Soviet decades, still have many unanswered questions. The “stunted archive” of this history, created by heteronormative Soviet and Russian information regimes, is not the only problem facing historians. 8 There have been releases and disclosures of state documents that hint at the contours of the story, but the way these have come to light, the manner of their presentation, and, crucially, their interpretation have marginalized their impact. Sometimes, a critical document has been seen only by a single researcher with privileged access to closed archives, and we only know of the material through the medium of that researcher’s publications. We have often learned of these documents through the ubiquitous post-Soviet genre of sensational “archival revelations” rather than serious scholarship. Frequently enough, unfortunately, these documents have been subject to homophobic, simplistic, or unprofessional readings by scholars, journalists, archivists, and curators. Many similar problems arise with the provenance and interpretation of non-offi cial sources: Vadim Kozin’s diary, for example, is unsympathetically edited and scholars cannot consult the original text. Questions about its provenance, whereabouts, and the integrity of the full document, have not been answered.9 Even where scholars have access to such documents, as in the case of Nikolai Kliuev’s letters, they frequently lack the will to read homosexual content empathetically and professionally. 10 The tattoos gathered from the bodies of Soviet ex-prisoners by Danzig Baldaev present a wealth of information about same- sex relations in the camps and prisons of the USSR , but their presentation in the compendia published by an art house, with an eye to the commercial market, is sketchy about their provenance. 11 Both offi cial and unoffi cial records of LGBT existence in Russia and the USSR are frequently mistreated by scholars and critics who fail to engage with LGBT historiography, reading practices, and source criticism. When it comes to the specifi c question of Soviet terror, there has been a general failure in the historical profession, in Russia and beyond it, to recognize homosexuals as victims of Stalinist violence, to consider where and how the records of this persecution are concealed in the archives, and to press for fuller disclosure of the archival record. Poor reasoning and faulty conceptualization of homosexual existence governs much interpretation of the question and the available documents. The entire picture needs an overhaul with fresh research and re-conceptualization using queer theory, informed and professional source criticism, and empathetic “queer eyes” in the archives. These issues are not merely narrow questions of historical technicalities. I would argue that this relative lack of historical information about the 154 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI mechanisms and scale of Soviet homophobic persecution affects contemporary debates about the status of the Russian LGBT community. In a cultural war over the production of queer knowledge, the “stunted archive” of Soviet queer history has political consequences. When we speak about the gay victims of Soviet persecution, we are forced by the current information famine to deal in conjecture and assumptions. For today’s LGBT Russians, this historical blank spot makes it that much harder to identify LGBT citizens as fellow victims of Stalinist oppression; and with very few biographies of named victims to discuss, the consequences of state oppression are diffi cult to concretize. With more historical examples of injustice, and clearer understanding of the specifi cally Soviet mechanisms of homophobic repression, Russian LGBT citizens could more easily explain the dangers of offi cial homophobic persecution to their fellow countrymen. European advances in the protection of LGBT citizens’ rights in the 1980s and 1990s were assisted by historical research and refl ection. A signifi cant change in public and elite perceptions in Germany, France, and other nations came as historical knowledge of the scale of Nazi violence against gay men and lesbians became known, thanks to independent and academic scholarly investigations that built a body of evidence about the human rights violations against LGBT Europeans in the 1930s–40s. Historians produced a “history of homophobia,” and the concept of “homophobia” underpinned political discussions. 12 Of course, the situation in contemporary Russia is different; and as I argue throughout this book, there is no “correct path” to full LGBT citizenship that Russians must follow. Nevertheless, more careful scholarship about the history of the oppression of sexual and gender dissent in the USSR would provide a much- needed evidence base for arguments in favor of strengthening the human rights of LGBT citizens in Russia. This chapter takes stock of what we now know about state persecution of male homosexuals from Stalin’s decision to make sodomy a crime in 1933–4 to the annulment of his law in 1993. The focus is on documentary evidence of homophobic state decision-making, and of the policing of the sodomy ban once it was introduced. While treating the repression of gay men, I do not minimize the ways in which the state also persecuted lesbians, but those methods were very different, and they must be the subject of a separate study.13 By examining the background to 1933–4 and the decisions made during Stalin’s homophobic turn, further questions arise about the rationale for offi cial Soviet homophobia. The political changes and policing methods introduced by Stalin’s successors after 1953 are also investigated, as they suggest ways in which future research might shed more light on the evolution of late-Soviet popular and offi cial homophobia. Many sources have come to light since I published my book on this subject in 2001; much of the research for that book was conducted under very different conditions than those which now prevail in Russia. 14 Some new sources have emerged because the de-classifi cation of Soviet state and Party documents is a slow and continuing process subject to resource and political constraints. These STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 155 documents were not yet declassifi ed in the 1990s when I was working on my 2001 book. Others have come to light thanks to scholars who shared their fi nds with me, responding to my research. Some researchers began to read the archives more queerly; I call their attention to LGBT issues the “queer eye” in the archives. The digital revolution in many of Russia’s archives has also made fi nding relevant documents somewhat easier. With keyword searches it is sometimes possible to identify queer material without the laborious needle-in-a- haystack trawls I used in 1995–6. The result of this stocktaking shows where gaps remain in our understanding of this story, and can assist LGBT Russians in their production of queer knowledge as they do battle with homophobes who would silence them.

The road to 1934

Scholars have described the persecution of same-sex relations in Muscovy, but much of this “homophobia” was generated by the Russian Orthodox Church and less so by the state. 15 The Russian state began to punish male same- sex sexuality later than in Europe. In the early eighteenth century, as part of military modernization, Peter the Great banned sodomy in the Imperial Russian army and navy; it seems that after this time, without a formal ban, sodomy between civilians was punished judicially too. 16 In 1835, Nicholas I explicitly extended the ban on male same-sex relations to wider society, in a new criminal code. He was supposedly motivated by reports of vice in the Empire’s boarding schools, but we still do not have a modern, queer-studies informed scholarly investigation of this episode and the tsar’s reasoning. Under this law, men who engaged in voluntary “sodomy” ( muzhelozhstvo ) were exiled to Siberia; sodomy with minors or the use of force netted exile with hard labor. The law remained in force until 1917, although the punishment for consensual relations was relaxed from Siberian exile to imprisonment for four to fi ve years, in 1900. There was no law against lesbian sex acts. When revolution came in 1917, the Bolsheviks abrogated all tsarist law in November 1917. Until 1922 there was no written criminal law. During this interval the Soviet government drafted and discarded a series of criminal codes.17 All of these drafts, beginning with the fi rst, written in early 1918 by the Bolsheviks’ coalition partners, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and continuing with versions drafted in 1920–1 by Bolshevik jurists and a consultant from the Cheka (secret police), decriminalized male homosexuality. The fi rst Soviet Russian criminal code of 1922 and the revision of this code in 1926 both confi rmed the legality of voluntary same-sex relations. The early Soviet regime never explained why it relaxed the law, but jurists looked to the tradition of the French Revolution. In 1791, sodomy and other religiously inspired “crimes” like heresy were repealed to secularize criminal law and separate church from state. In Bolshevik Russia, the fi rst 156 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI

People’s Commissar of Public Health, Nikolai Semashko, believed the “sexual revolution” demanded a scientifi c approach to the question of homosexuality. However, he expressed this view in 1923 not in Russia, but while paying a visit to the socialist sex- reformer Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sex Research in Berlin. Leading Communists Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotsky wrote nothing explicitly about homosexuality. Lenin probably thought it was an insignifi cant question, and he dismissed narrow sexual interests and politics in his 1920 interview with Klara Tsetkin. 18 Internationally, sex reformers led by Hirschfeld hailed the Soviet government as progressive for lifting the ban. It was progressive: male homosexuality remained a crime in Britain until 1967 and in Germany until the late 1960s. It is diffi cult to say how “enlightened” offi cial, expert, and popular Soviet attitudes toward homosexuality were in the 1920s. Much more research needs to be done in several directions, including using the techniques of the history of emotions and subjectivity, to establish the depth and extent of the early Soviet “sexual revolution” in general, and as it related to homosexuality in particular. 19 We know that parts of the Soviet state resisted decriminalization, with a particularly sharp confrontation coming in Petrograd in January 1921, when police raided a “pederasts’ party” and arrested ninety-fi ve men, some dressed as women. It appears that the entire operation was based on faulty intelligence: the authorities thought they were uncovering a counterrevolutionary conspiracy, not a threat to public morality. The case was abandoned after a considerable set of archives – psychiatric and legal – was compiled, and at least one jurist in the new government argued unsuccessfully that the men should be charged with hooliganism. 20 New work on this fascinating case is forthcoming from Olga Khoroshilova and Irina Roldugina.21 The most thrilling discovery made by these researchers is of a photograph from archives of the case, of a group of men later arrested; they are dressed in a variety of wedding and fancy-dress costumes, with fourteen out of seventeen men in women’s attire. Khoroshilova, a historian of St. Petersburg’s cross-dressing entertainment scene, reading the record of the case held in the city’s archive, uncovers the likely identities of these men and shows their cross- class origins. 22 Roldugina’s work on the same case confi rms the diversity of their class and cultural backgrounds, and observes the “openness with which the men spoke about their homosexuality,” positing that the 1917 Revolution had aroused in these men a more defi ant consciousness evident in their interrogations with the authorities. 23 This new work on the “pederasts’ party” of 1921 demonstrates how determined sleuthing in the archives, with queer eyes, can produce fresh understandings of gay subjectivities in revolutionary Russia. In the period of sodomy decriminalization from 1922 to 1933, the voices of homosexuals themselves did not appear in offi cially sanctioned publications, except as “patients” in psychiatric case histories, or in small print runs of the poetry of Mikhail Kuzmin, Nikolai Kliuev, and Sophia Parnok, for small, déclassé audiences. 24 There is no historical scholarship investigating popular STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 157

“straight” attitudes toward homosexuality during this period, but it would be possible to read archival and medico-legal sources against the grain to examine this question. However defi ant the 1921 “pederasts” of Petrograd may have felt, once the Soviet regime stabilized, Russia’s queer men and women largely chose to hide their sexual identities (however they understood them). Clearly they did not feel “emancipated” to the degree that Berlin lesbians and gay men, the denizens of the world’s most developed homosexual metropolis in the 1920s, did. The eradication of civil society in the Soviet state over the course of the 1920s narrowed the possible sites for the exploration of Russian queer existence. In Weimar Germany, by contrast, sex reformer Hirschfeld’s pleas for acceptance of the homosexual on the basis of a medical-biological explanation for sexual variation had emancipatory effects in the 1920s. Such arguments opened a space for a gay and lesbian civil society in a liberal- democratic political system, even if Weimar formally continued to punish male homosexuality in law. Of course Hirschfeld’s medicalization argument was controversial then, and his opponents within the homophile community of Germany developed alternative models to explain homosexual love. 25 The intellectual currents running through the thinking of Soviet homosexuals, and the cultural, national, and transnational reference points to which they looked remain unexplored opportunities for future research.26 Medicalization of sexualities in Soviet Russia led to some avant-garde proposals, but without the Weimar German emphasis on individual freedom. In February 1929, leading psychiatrists and physicians in the People’s Commissariat of Health held a long discussion about homosexuality, “transvestites,” and women passing as men. The discussion was prompted by a request for a surgical and passport sex change from a Soviet citizen; but the conversation quickly overran the bounds of this single case. The experts considered the medical and social issues, both positive and negative, associated with “passing” women, with male homosexuality observed in Russia and Central Asia, and they also shared their knowledge of early Soviet attempts to change sex with surgery (pre-dating the now well-known 1930 case of Lili Elbe in Germany). With some reservations, in the context of discussion of “passing” women, they proposed allowing same-sex marriages under psychiatric guidance. They wanted women “dressed as men” to be allowed to marry the women they loved: whether these experts imagined they were helping subjects we would now describe as “lesbian” or “transgender” is impossible to gauge. Their proposal was forgotten and evidently abandoned.27 We know too that Soviet doctors’ attitudes toward the psychological and sexual problems of the intersex patient were among the most humane medical views in the world in the late 1920s and into the 1930s.28 Nevertheless, the Soviet “sexual revolution” was a revolution for the collective, not for the individual, with distinctively medical and technocratic notes. When we discuss and investigate the early Soviet “sexual revolution,” we need to purge our analysis of decades of Western Freudian, 158 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI feminist and gay liberationist retrospective projections to grasp just how unfamiliar this revolution was. 29 Additionally, cultural historians have noted just how much anxiety, fear, patriarchal contempt, and even violence the Soviet “sexual revolution” inspired in the gradually Stalinizing Communist Party of the 1920s.30 Enlightened medical thinking among men of science meant little when the political landscape was shifting, as it began to rapidly in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Stalinist homophobia and repression

In 1933, Stalin and his secret police laid the foundations of modern Russia’s state-sponsored homophobia with their terror campaigns, legislation, and policing routines. Evidence points to the origins of this homophobic turn in the roll-out of internal identity documents (“passports”) for the inhabitants of major Soviet cities in 1933; but the source of the specifi cally anti- homosexual drive remains unclear. In this section I discuss the evolution of Stalin’s 1933–4 anti-sodomy law as it now appears, from sources new and old. How historians and others have handled these sources is sometimes contentious, and that aspect is examined here too. Many questions remain unanswered and there are still critical archival holdings about Stalinist homophobia largely closed to historians; the prospects and challenges for researchers and activists are also addressed in this section. What we know about the origin of the anti- sodomy law comes principally from a very limited release of correspondence between the secret police and Stalin, from the Presidential Archives, loosely timed to coincide with the abolition of this law by President Boris Yeltsin’s reforming administration in spring 1993. It was published in the archive’s journal.31 The anonymous archivist or editors who published the documents said nothing to explain why they were being published or in what documentary context they are held (and there is no public catalog to the Presidential Archive). It appears that the archival fi le upon which the publication is based comes from a fond devoted to the secret police, and relates specifi cally to the anti- sodomy law. It may be that this fi le is part of an entire “thematic folder” of fi les on homosexuality, for use by Stalin and the Politburo. 32 The 1993 release of this material effectively constituted a Soviet-style “signal” to the reader to connect the dots: Stalin made this law, and therefore Yeltsin’s reforming regime was getting rid of it. On September 15, 1933, deputy chief of the OGPU (secret police) Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against “pederasty” was needed urgently. Stalin and Yagoda used the crude term pederastiia to discuss male homosexuality; but government lawyers revived the tsarist term muzhelozhstvo (sodomy) for the published law that was eventually adopted in March 1934. Yagoda reported that in August–September 1933, OGPU raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 159

Leningrad, and other cities of the Soviet Union. Yagoda wrote that these men were guilty of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.”33 From a recent collection of FSB archive documents of political cases against young Communists, it is clear that during the early 1930s, the secret police were obsessed with detecting counterrevolutionary moods among young people. 34 Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich, noting that “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing a law against “pederasty” should be adopted. In the months that followed, Yagoda the secret policeman steered its passage through the various legislative drafts. He argued that “sodomy . . . for payment, as a profession, or publicly” (“muzhelozhstvo . . . za platu, po professii ili publichno ”) deserved particularly stiff punishment. The word “publicly” caught Stalin’s eye and, late in the legislative process, he intervened. According to research by David Brandenberger in declassifi ed archives, sometime between February 20 and March 7 1934, Stalin personally underlined the word “publicly” and then struck out the whole phrase about male prostitution and public sex from the draft law. 35 Oddly, in Ukraine in January 1934, where the law was adopted very rapidly after the Politburo and the central Soviet legislature (TsIK SSSR ) published their draft decrees on the sodomy ban, this phrase about public sex and male prostitution remained in the law as adopted. We still do not know why the phrase stayed in the Ukrainian version. Was this merely an example of chaotic and hasty law- making, not unusual for the period? Or, did Stalin, Yagoda, and the Politburo believe that male prostitution was more prevalent in Ukraine than in Russia? Indeed, was the law more urgently “required” in Ukraine by the secret police, who were perhaps manufacturing a “homosexual conspiracy” there? The Ukrainian “factor” in the story of the anti-sodomy law surfaces in a range of memoir and offi cial archival accounts discussed below. In Boris Nicolaevsky’s “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” the launch of the anti-sodomy law is explained as a response to a “homosexual conspiracy” originating in a late–1933 “German propaganda” operation among homosexual circles in Moscow, Leningrad, and the Ukrainian cities of Kharkov and Kiev. 36 The “Letter’s” explanation might have a bearing on the circumstances that triggered the wider Soviet anti-homosexual purge. In the 1993 APRF document releases, references to Ukraine would have been removed to avoid offending Russia’s newly independent neighbor. Notwithstanding these factors, with the major exception of Ukraine, by March 7, 1934, all Soviet republics had adopted the Stalin-edited version of the sodomy ban. 37 Stalin’s editorial pencil also inserted a minimum sentence of three years for consenting male homosexuality – the maximum was fi ve years, already established in earlier drafts of the law.38 Stalin’s purpose in fi xing a minimum penalty for sodomy was not stated but can be guessed. From 1930, those offenders sentenced to three years or more were sent to the Gulag system’s 160 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI corrective-labor camps (ispravitel’no- trudovye lageria , ITL) which were isolated from central Russia in the far north and east. They were places of hard labor and sometimes very high mortality, seen as the ultimate punishment short of execution. In the early 1930s, these camps, many of them canal-building, forestry, and mining sites, were chronically short of labor and the Gulag was pressing Stalin for more prisoners. Many ended up there on falsifi ed “political” charges; but the worst recidivist criminals were sent there too. Meanwhile, prisoners with sentences of less than three years went to corrective-labor colonies (ispravitel’no- trudovye kolonii , ITK), closer to centers of population. Inmates of colonies were usually petty criminals, often workers who had been given a “proletarian discount” in their sentences; Soviet criminology taught that these people were most likely to be “reforged” into good citizens. 39 By setting a minimum sentence of three years, Stalin evidently intended that male homosexuals should end up in Gulag camps as opposed to colonies and be exposed to much harsher conditions as a result. Such a decision also sheds light on Stalin’s conception of “pederasts” in the Soviet social taxonomy: as “socially alien” to the Soviet system, by comparison with the “socially friendly” prisoners who could be “reforged” in prison colonies. 40 Whatever the reasoning, what Stalin wanted and what really happened did not always coincide. My own study of sentencing patterns drawn from a limited sample of Moscow city sodomy cases of the 1930s shows that many men, not just workers, were sentenced to less than three years and presumably did time in colonies rather than camps.41 In the very fragmented court records surviving in the archives, it is normally impossible to trace the fates of individuals once they left the courtroom. Local court records only refl ect individuals who were handled by the conventional justice system, not the hidden administrative organs of the secret police. We have virtually no access to their deliberations and we know almost nothing about their treatment of victims of this law. Historians know very little about the OGPU’s raids against homosexuals that Yagoda says were conducted in late summer 1933. These raids are not described or recorded in the documents about Soviet state terror that have been published in authoritative archival document collections since 1991. 42 Only a few foreign sources mention these raids, including works by Wilhelm Reich, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and the “Letter of an Old Bolshevik” previously mentioned. 43 This “stunted archive” has produced the impression among historians of Stalinist state terror, working in the archives opened to us since 1991, that homosexuals did not constitute a specifi c category of Stalin’s “victims.” But it has recently become clear from hard-to-access documents of the archives of the FSB that secret police discussions of persecution of homosexuals took place during the early 1930s, in the context of the social purging of the cities in these years of crisis and upheaval. Additionally, fragmentary evidence has come to light of attempts in the 1930s by the secret police and judicial organs to endow the crime of male homosexuality with a politicized narrative. STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 161

In 2013, a St. Petersburg history journal published an article, “Counterrevolutionary Organizations among Homosexualists [sic] of Leningrad in the early 1930s.” 44 The author was Viktor Ivanov, then head of the History Department of the St. Petersburg University of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (i.e. a police academy). Enjoying privileged access to the local archive of the FSB , he used operational and individual case fi le documents about the raids in Leningrad on homosexual men conducted in 1933–4. It must be said that despite this article’s title, there are no traces of genuine “counterrevolutionary organizations among homosexualists” in the documents presented. Professor Ivanov’s lack of empathy for the victims of this repression, and his failure to conceptualize their experience except through the secret policeman’s lens, are among the many technical weaknesses this article displays. Struggling without the appropriate language and knowledge to contextualize his archival “nugget,” Ivanov writes in a bemused tone about “pederasts,” “clients,” and husbands bored with their wives who therefore succumb to “their lowest desires.” (The decision to publish this clumsily homophobic article during the 2012–13 local debate about the status of St. Petersburg’s LGBT organizations and their supposed “propaganda for homosexuality” seems opportunistic to say the least.) But reading against the grain of his analysis and terminology, it is possible to glean some interesting facts about the operations against homosexuals and about the perceptions of the secret police regarding “homosexualists” of that time. From this it is possible to speculate on the future research directions that queer eyes in the archives may and will take. 45 First, it is apparent that a critical mechanism for identifying those engaged in homosexual relations was the fi ltration of the population as the police distributed internal passports for city residents in early 1933. Ivanov notes that the police compiled “compromising” information about residents during the passportization operation and he infers that this included information about non-standard sexual relations. 46 He notes that those defendants who fi gure in the case fi les against homosexuals in Leningrad in summer and autumn 1933 were residents who had successfully passed through the passport fi ltration process, receiving passports and with that the right to live in Leningrad. Only during summer 1933, when the attention of the secret police seems to have turned to homosexuality as a form of anti- social activity, was use made of this “compromising material.” Ivanov says that the police processed this material in the standard bureaucratic ways, deciding which people to arrest immediately and whom might be left under observation. Second, Ivanov points to the extraordinary secrecy with which the 1933 anti-homosexual operation was conducted in Leningrad. It was not handled by regular police (“militia”) and was not widely discussed; instead it was initiated by the Secret-Political Department of the local secret police. Third, he quotes from case fi le documents that display the police’s diverse perceptions of male same-sex relations. Some give descriptions of the streets and parks where low-class gay male cruising takes place; still 162 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI others mention sailors who beat gay men when invited to have sex. The majority of the defendants fi guring in the case fi les that Ivanov cites are white- collar workers and artists, some of whom are said to think that homosexuality constitutes a special caste, a “Bohemian” lifestyle more elevated than philistine male–female relations. Others express consternation at the police’s new political construction of homosexuality as anti-Soviet. Interrogators quote one Lev Konstantinovich Lisenko, arrested in August 1933, arguing that not all homosexuals can be disloyal: “How can it be that all of them were so terrible? Surely pederasts [sic] are people too, they are workers in the very same factories, members of the same trade unions, and sometimes, of the Party? It can’t be that all pederasts were ‘Cutie Pie-Sergeys’ [Serezhami-Pupsikami], conducting their counterrevolutionary agitation under the eyes of the police in Catherine Square?” 47 In Ivanov’s documents, Lisenko appears as a thoughtful individual who has much to say about the condition of gay men in Soviet society, and his case fi le merits a more sophisticated reading than Ivanov was capable of supplying.48 Professor Ivanov’s exposition evades the question of where the initiative for an anti-homosexual crackdown originated. Did it come locally, from social- purging operations linked to passportization, or centrally, in orders from the secret police leadership in Moscow? Irina Roldugina, who examined the principal fi le in the St. Petersburg FSB archive four years after Ivanov used it, reports that the relevant pages on operational matters were not open to view; by the time she saw the fi le, they were sewn into the standard blue envelope that conceals classifi ed pages from the researcher. 49 The locus of the operation in the Secret-Political Department appears to suggest direction from Moscow; but whatever the origins, the two rationales (social purging and national security concerns) reinforced each other. Ivanov makes clear that the secret police began their raids against Leningrad’s “pederasts” during a wave of social and political purging of the city and environs. Indeed we know from painstaking Western research in the open archives of the Soviet state that this wave of urban social purging, a fi ltration process that accompanied passportization, was directed nationally by the secret police, and fi rst targeted the USSR ’s most important centers, designated “regime” cities.50 Compromising information on suspect individuals was collected as passports were issued, and entered in police card-indexes. 51 During 1933, internal directives of the secret police articulated categories of citizens to be denied passports and thereby forced to leave regime cities, and while male homosexuals were not explicitly enumerated, the category of “antisocial” and “declassed” persons, often those with ties to street crime and prostitution, are mentioned explicitly. 52 Moreover, “oral instructions” given to agents working on passportization early on in 1933 facilitated “excesses” of zealous enforcement that conceivably extended the range of suspect categories to male homosexuals with gregarious networks that crossed class and occupational boundaries to include male prostitutes. 53 Yet we remain in the realm of speculation; the source of the impulse to move from what may have STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 163 been random and spontaneous police notations about individual homosexuals to a national ban on “pederasty” remains unknown, and can only be traced with freer access to secret police archives. When in mid-September 1933 Yagoda wrote to Stalin, recommending the adoption of a formal law against sodomy, he apparently cited a fi gure of 130 arrests of “pederasts” for the operations in “Moscow and Leningrad.” 54 According to Ivanov, the archives of the St. Petersburg FSB reveal that during August–September 1933, 175 men were arrested on grounds of homosexual relations in Leningrad alone. 55 The raids on “pederasts” continued and probably expanded to the principal “regime” cities, including Kharkov and Kiev. It appears that somewhere inside the central secret police machinery, an order originated in late July or early August 1933 to begin arrests of “pederasts” known to the authorities on their card- indexes either as “anti- social” or “declassed” elements, or as a security threat with international dimensions. Evidence of probable police fabrication of an ideological basis for the law emerges later, in documents Ivanov seems to have obtained from the FSB . In January 1934, an “Open Letter from Moscow and Kharkov Homosexualists to Mr Marinus van der Lubbe” appeared in Leningrad. Ivanov writes that Leningrad military counterintelligence found this letter in the possession of a local homosexual during an investigation of a conspiratorial group. The accused supposedly obtained it from a Moscow gay man. Ivanov concludes that few, if any, Leningrad homosexuals saw or knew of this letter.56 Van der Lubbe was the Dutch anarchist accused and later executed for starting the Reichstag Fire. His homosexuality became a political weapon in the propaganda war between socialists and fascists, discussed in the “Brown Book” on the “facts” of the Reichstag fi re, written by exiled German Communists, and translated and published in September 1933 in the USSR in a print-run of 20,000. Soviet homosexuals no doubt read with alarm the condemnation of van der Lubbe’s homosexuality that in this account was tied to his political betrayal. He was said to have abandoned Communist comrades in Holland, met a gay associate of Ernst Roehm, and become “materially dependent” on these “homosexual connections with National Socialist leaders.” 57 Whether they were so daring as to address an open letter to van der Lubbe seems highly unlikely as a rational political act; in any case, the letter’s anti-Communist language looks calculated to incriminate anyone tied to it. The letter blames the Reichstag fi re on Communists, criticizes Soviet living conditions, indicts Soviet educational policy as inspiring depravity in young people, and argues that police ignorance and lack of culture are to blame for the pogrom being waged against Soviet homosexuals. “How could we, the third sex, with our tender hearts and feelings [tretii pol, s nashei nezhnoi dushoi i chuvstvami ] be capable of the destruction of culture, order, civilization? No, no, a thousand times no. . . . We are for culture, civilization, order,” it concludes. The “Open Letter of Moscow and Kharkov Homosexualists” was perhaps the foundation for a secret police-manufactured “homosexual conspiracy” against Soviet 164 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI power – the conspiracy later mentioned in the “Letter of an Old Bolshevik.” 58 I believe that the “Open Letter” is a Soviet secret police fabrication, but without queer eyes in the archives, and freer access to secret police operational fi les, the question remains open. Ivanov’s article and Roldugina’s recent probing of the sources he used demonstrate an important fact about archival material on the Stalinist anti- homosexual campaign: local FSB archives, in former “regime” cities and beyond, will probably contain the most detailed and interesting materials about the persecution of homosexual men, and about police perceptions of dissenting sexualities. In certain cases where the biography of a particular victim of the Stalinist anti-homosexual campaign was known, e.g. the poet Nikolai Kliuev, or the singer Vadim Kozin, the most important materials about their experience were found by researchers in local, not national, FSB and police archival collections. 59 This fact suggests, however, that researchers need to know the names of victims, and their eventual whereabouts in the Gulag system, before their case fi les and any surviving personal documents attached to their cases might be located. The dispersal of the archives of the victims of the anti-sodomy law across the breadth of the Soviet Union poses enormous hurdles for historians. Yet it also suggests that most regional urban secret police archives in the former Soviet Union, and secret police archives for Gulag districts, will contain some traces of the persecution of homosexuals in this period, if one could only engage in a trawl of these records. Of course such trawls are currently impossible in the Russian Federation, but some post-Soviet countries have more open access policies in the secret police archives they hold, and therein lies an opportunity for further exploration.

Reactions, and the geopolitics of Stalin’s homophobic turn

In the 1993 release of correspondence between Yagoda and Stalin leading to the sodomy ban, one other signifi cant document was published from the same fi le in the Presidential Archive. It is a sixteen-page letter to Stalin, from a homosexual British Communist, Harry O. Whyte (1907–60), an ex- patriate journalist living in Moscow who loved a man who was a Soviet citizen. His Soviet lover was arrested sometime during late 1933 or early 1934. The release of the Whyte letter said little about its provenance and the author. 60 It was typical of the 1993 publication that this document also appeared without commentary, but was labeled “Humor from the Special Collections” by archivists or editors who failed to show any historical empathy or intellectual curiosity. Whyte, who worked for the English-language Moscow Daily News , wrote to Stalin, in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. The journalist STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 165 boldly explained why it violated the principles of both Marxism and the Soviet revolution. He argued that persecution of the law-abiding homosexual was typical of capitalist regimes and fascist ones: Nazi Germany’s “racial purity” drive was just the most extreme example of the push in both systems for “labor reserves and cannon fodder.” “[C]onstitutional homosexuals, as an insignifi cant portion of the population . . . cannot present a threat to the birth rate in a socialist state.” Their position was analogous to that of other unjustly persecuted groups: “women, colored races, national minorities” and the best traditions of socialism showed tolerance of the relatively insignifi cant number of naturally occurring homosexuals in the population. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fi t to become a member of the Communist Party?” In a revealing reaction, Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.” Whyte got a blunt answer to his question: he was expelled from the Communist Party; he hastily left the Soviet Union for England in 1935. His passionate commitment to socialism was undimmed and he continued his career in journalism in Britain and abroad. 61 Stalin’s brusque ascription of social-Darwinist “degeneration” to this letter- writer refl ected the widespread credence then given to theories of the heritability of so-called social “diseases” such as suicide, alcoholism, and tuberculosis. 62 Bolsheviks reveled in terms of abuse like “degeneration,” “degenerate,” and “perversion,” to denigrate the political ideas and reputations of opponents regardless of their Marxist propensity to construct social and environmental causes for all things human. The fact that Stalin even read the Whyte letter was signifi cant: only a fraction of the thousands of letters addressed to him actually crossed his desk and the dictator controlled the fi ltering process. He paid close attention to letters addressing “theoretical” questions but much less often to those from “enemies” of the regime.63 Thus Whyte’s letter appears as an exceptional case that seems to have compelled Stalin to commission an explanation about the purpose of the anti-homosexual law, with an eye to world left- wing opinion and, in particular, to the Soviet Union’s propaganda war with European fascism. One wonders how far the geopolitical and international- communist ideological dimensions of the offi cial homophobic policy had been anticipated before the receipt of this letter, by those who decided to embark upon the internal, domestic, anti-homosexual campaign. To judge from the January 1934 appearance of the “Open Letter of Moscow and Kharkov Homosexualists,” the secret police had prepared the outline of a narrative. Now it needed fi lling in. The dictator turned to his cultural spokesman Maxim Gorky, to explain the law’s rationale for Soviet and European readers (Figure 7.1). Gorky wrote an article that appeared in Izvestiia and Pravda on May 23, 1934, and later in a German-language socialist newspaper in Switzerland, in which he compared healthy Soviet youth to the degenerate youth of Nazi Germany. “Destroy the homosexuals – and fascism will disappear” he concluded, propounding the genocide of a social group on the grounds of sexuality. 166 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI

FIGURE 7.1 Maxim Gorky (right) with Andrey Zhdanov, a Party cultural ideologue, 1934. Source: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.

(Incidentally, scholars often mistranslate this slogan as “Destroy homosexuality . . .” and its genocidal intent is lost.) Later in 1936, People’s Commissar of Justice Nikolai V. Krylenko gave a speech to the central Soviet legislature in which he explained that the law was necessary because homosexuals were not healthy workers but “a declassed rabble, or the scum of society, or remnants of the exploiting classes.” 64 These were rare public statements about the law, again demonstrating how Stalin’s regime preferred to shroud its introduction in secrecy. During the 1939–41 interval of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, the Soviet regime apparently considered breaking that silence. Roldugina’s energetic archival trawls reveal that a show-trial of homosexuals was prepared in late 1939, but the plans were shelved. The documents about it are held in fi les associated with “Stalin’s prosecutor” Andrei Y. Vyshinsky, who at the time directed the legal affairs of the secret police.65 Vyshinsky only briefl y supervised secret police legal matters in the wake of the Great Terror, and the idea of a public airing of the theme of international homosexual conspiracy appears to have been considered and dropped in less than four months. One suspects it was raised during the era of Nazi-Soviet cooperation with its public relations demonstrations of harmony between the Nazi and Soviet regimes. No doubt Vyshinsky found a suitable anti- homosexual narrative diffi cult to construct, since previously both sides had ascribed homosexuality to the other. Whatever the fate of this individual case, once the Hitler–Stalin Pact was ruptured with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the extreme secrecy surrounding the anti- sodomy law remained a settled feature of Stalinist rule. STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 167

Arrests and trends in enforcement to the end of Stalin’s rule

As mentioned, the number of men arrested, prosecuted, and convicted under Stalin’s anti-sodomy law between 1933 and 1993 remains diffi cult to fi x. The number of convictions for the Stalin era up to 1953 is particularly impossible to establish satisfactorily, given archival limitations. No Russian or foreign historians, no non-governmental organizations, no political parties, and no individual politicians have ever asked the FSB to supply information on this question. Tracing Stalin-era victims of the anti- sodomy law will be complicated; careful study of the mechanisms of Stalinist terror is required to fi nd these victims. In the fi rst weeks of Yagoda’s raids against “pederasts” in Soviet cities, before the anti-sodomy law was in place, many homosexual men were probably arrested on charges of counterrevolutionary crimes, some apparently in combination with existing sex-crime articles, cited “by analogy.” This much- criticized Soviet legal principle allowing the prosecution of a non-criminal act “by analogy” to a defi ned crime, was used in these cases to serve in place of the sodomy ban, still then in the process of formalization. Indeed, Roldugina reports from the St. Petersburg FSB fi les that the earliest cases in Leningrad, considered in late 1933, were brought under the infamous article 58 of the Soviet Russian criminal code that punished counterrevolutionary actions or speech, sometimes in combination with articles that punished infecting someone with sexually transmitted disease (article 150), or compelling a woman into prostitution (article 155).66 New data from the Siberian case fi le of poet Nikolai Kliuev illustrates the point well. Kliuev was denounced to Yagoda by literary bureaucrat Ivan M. Gronsky in February 1934 for his homosexuality; and he was charged “by analogy” with article 151, which punished “sexual intercourse with persons not having achieved sexual maturity,” and article 58.67 Even after the anti-sodomy law was enacted, we see combined charges – suggesting that investigators linked sodomy to anti-state intentions along the lines Yagoda proposed when he drafted the law. Probably, secret police instructions about the law, still inaccessible to us, circulated to explain this linkage to lower-level operatives. Two 1935–6 cases against a party offi cial and an NKVD employee recently noted by Jonathan Waterlow in the relatively open former central Communist Party archives combine denunciations of homosexuality with charges of supporting “Trotskyism.” 68 Secret police embedded in state and party organizations seem to have been the transmission-belts for action against networks of queer men in the immediate aftermath of the homophobic law, but traces of their activity in the available archives are confi ned to rare documents that went to the highest police and party leadership. 69 The policeman’s view of an inherent relationship between unconventional sexuality and “crimes” of counterrevolution is often presumed in LGBT histories of Stalinist homophobia, but we do not have any studies of documentary sources that could demonstrate 168 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI how that relationship was explained to police and investigators, and what offi cial procedures fi xed the links between sexual and political deviation. Understanding how the anti-sodomy law was applied during and after the Second World War in the USSR requires more research. For the war years 1941–5, there are barely any recorded convictions found in the available records. 70 Invasion, evacuation, plummeting food supplies, and mass mortality shocked the Soviet Union such that the authorities probably paid little attention to same-sex relations during the national emergency. Most citizens were starving, laboring in extreme conditions, or on the move.71 (The contrast with Anglo-American experience of the war as a time that brought a modern homosexual identity into being for millions could not be greater.) 72 The only mass institution that was generously fed in wartime was the Red Army, and as Arthur Clech correctly observes, it was “perhaps the institution most productive of homosexual practices” at the time. 73 The regulation of sexual relations in the army was reportedly slack, and current research on wartime sexuality says little about what Army rules as recorded in military archives actually said about sex; most attention focuses on heterosexual affairs as remembered in memoirs (900,000 women served in the Red Army, of whom 120,000 were combatants). 74 This “heterosexual” research unaccountably ignores the homogenic effects of largely homosocial life at the front. Clech astutely notes that fear, generous alcohol and food rations, and intense comradely bonds in the face of ubiquitous violent death must have produced same-sex affairs in the ranks that were deliberately overlooked by commanders. He also points to the presence of Gulag penal battalions at the front, ex-prisoners who may have brought their violent, hierarchical homosexual practices to the battlefi eld with them. 75 The memory of these stigmatized male same-sex practices and relationships was suppressed in post- war memoirs that expressed a “stubborn, bordering on monolithic . . . heterosexual fantasy” about wartime relationships that were heroic, patriotic, and, if not chaste, then resolved successfully in marriage. 76 Soviet annexation of the independent Baltic republics – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – during the Second World War brought the USSR ’s legislation including the Soviet version of the ban on male homosexuality. It seems extraordinary that in the violent tumult of the sovietization of Latvia, for instance, the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party found the time to discuss the prosecution of “pederasts,” as reported in the emerging research of Ineta Lipša. 77 In fact, of the interwar Baltic republics, Latvia and Lithuania had retained a form of the Imperial Russian sodomy ban, and it was now sovietized; only Estonia had decriminalized sodomy and had the full Soviet ban imposed with annexation.78 Other annexed territories (Western Ukraine, Moldova) also had the Soviet anti-sodomy legislation imposed, although more research is needed to understand the impact in these regions. Trends in policing homosexuality in the late Stalin years also remain diffi cult to chart. Conviction statistics for the years 1945–60 are fragmentary STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 169 at best; for the RSFSR we have nothing for 1951–60. Rather anomalously, we know that 130 men were convicted in 1950 in the RSFSR under the anti- sodomy law, with a regional and quarterly breakdown that testifi es to possible raids on queer networks: the manufacturing city of Tula, 173 km south of Moscow led the way (twenty convictions all in the fourth quarter), Sverdlovsk had thirteen convictions, and fi nally the capitals Leningrad (nine) and Moscow (six) fell some distance behind, perhaps suggesting that little attention was paid to cases in the larger cities. 79 To judge from cases in the archives of the Moscow People’s Courts, and from Leningrad Province, for the period, arrests were the result of denunciations by neighbors, or passersby who happened upon public encounters between men; and they could also result when other crimes were reported. 80 In the last eight years of Stalin’s life, only eleven men were convicted of sodomy in Soviet Latvia. 81 In the more rural Belorussian SSR , only eight men were convicted under the analogous law in these years. 82 Despite the fact that terror against the population was renewed between 1945 and 1953, there are no memoir reports of coordinated raids on male homosexual circles, similar to those of 1933–4, for the last years of Stalin’s rule. One possible exception surrounds the 1948 arrest of fi lm student and later internationally renowned director Sergei Paradzhanov. In the summer of that year, he was part of “a small coterie of young men in Tbilisi” arrested because of their association with a secret police offi cial, who also worked in the Georgian Society of Cultural Liaisons with Foreign Countries, an international front organization. 83 Perhaps the link between foreign spying and homosexuality was being revived in postwar security apparatus scenarios. No access to secret police discussions about the danger from “pederasts” in the era is possible in the case of Russia, and nothing has thus far emerged from other republican secret police archives. A fi nal point about Stalin- era persecution of homosexuals as refl ected in the archival records is the diffi culty of charting the experience of prisoners in the Gulag, discussed in Chapter 1. The documents of that experience in the Gulag are apparently confi ned to still-classifi ed secret police papers. In the Stalin era, same-sex relations were virtually never mentioned in the Gulag’s offi cial documents to which we have access; rare exceptions refer to the rape and sexual abuse of juvenile male prisoners. In a published document of the Central Archive of the FSB , one mentions how, at the Solovki “special purpose” camp, a 1920s prototype of the Gulag system, teenaged male prisoners “are demoralized morally and physically by the adults among the prisoners (the use of them as passive pederasts fl ourishes).” The Shanin Commission that inspected Solovki after international criticism of Soviet penal camps made this observation in 1930. 84 Probably, secret police operational fi les at the local camp level record the cases that came to the attention of camp authorities, but these will be in regional FSB archives. Local court records may hold trial records for homosexual rape in nearby camps and colonies; I have found one such case, involving a teenage rapist 170 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI and victim, for a penal colony in Leningrad Province in 1954, when procedures were in fl ux. 85 As noted in Chapter 1, only after the death of Stalin in 1953 did Gulag administrators begin to record their discussions about homosexuality in the camps.

Renewing “the struggle against sodomy” in the 1950s–80s

After Stalin’s death, “political terror” changed as Party leader Nikita Khrushchev promoted de-Stalinization. Khrushchev and his successors evolved an authoritarian regime that still used political persecution, but more selectively, and without deliberate killing, against a narrower spectrum of targets. Nationalists, religious believers, and political “dissidents” were subjected to secretive police actions that abused their human rights. Where did sexual minorities fi t in this reforming environment? The civilian police, KGB, and Soviet leadership apparently could not decide. Sometimes they treated homosexuals as simple sex-criminals, and at other times as social or political “dissidents” following defi nitions established in Stalinist ideology in the 1930s. Sometimes the two ideas fused when arrests targeted homosexuals with a “political” past. What is becoming evident from new research is that policing routines modernized and became enmeshed with other forms of surveillance. In the 1950s, at Khrushchev’s instigation, Soviet jurists reviewed and abolished hundreds of Stalin-era statutes. As described in Chapter 1, in 1958 an order of the Interior Ministry of the RSFSR “on the strengthening of the struggle against sodomy” was secretly issued. It evidently told police they should make greater efforts to crack down on homosexuality between men. We have no access to records that could explain why it was adopted, nor what conceptions of male homosexuality informed the discussions surrounding it in the Interior Ministry, or the Communist Party. From the archives of the Gulag of the 1950s, we know that authorities were greatly concerned about the homosexuality and sexually transmitted infections ( STIs) they observed in the camps. With millions of prisoners being released, the public reacted angrily to the appearance of “criminals” in the streets, and the government worried about the crime waves that followed these amnesties. 86 It seems likely that the Interior Ministry, the KGB , and the Party believed that the “contagion” of homosexuality (and the STI s they associated with queer sex) also threatened Soviet society as these prisoners were freed, and that this rationale explains the 1958 renewal of the Stalinist anti- homosexual law in the RSFSR . In the new Russian criminal code of 1960, the sodomy ban remained in place, this time with Stalin’s minimum sentence removed; but the maximum sentence for voluntary relations would remain for fi ve years until the law’s repeal in 1993.87 STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 171

In other Soviet republics, analogous orders were probably given to civilian police. From archival research, Ineta Lipša suggests that the KGB oversaw the process by which local republican police forces discussed the law’s renewal. A signifi cant variation in the maximum sentences for sodomy appeared in the 1961 criminal codes adopted in the Baltic republics, from Estonia’s low two-year limit, to Lithuania (three years) and Latvia (fi ve years).88 Perhaps these limits mirrored interwar leniency in Estonia and traditional severity in the other two republics. What seems indicative of some central KGB or Party direction in the legal drafts is the rejection of proposals from Riga’s civilian police to penalize all “satisfaction of sexual desire [between] same-sex individuals” – a major extension of the law that would have banned even lesbian sex. Nevertheless, Lipša found no records of KGB, expert, or Party comment on this proposal – and the law adopted in 1961 banned “sodomy” alone. Such processes were replicated around the USSR and could be investigated in each republic’s archives. Recorded prosecutions for same-sex relations between men rapidly increased throughout the USSR. From 1961 to 1981, 14,695 men were convicted of sodomy in the RSFSR , constituting between 0.10 and 0.17 percent of all criminal convictions each year. 89 In the rest of the USSR , 7,468 men were convicted during the same period. Lipša, Teet Veispak, and Uladzimir Valodzin report analogous surges in convictions for Latvia, Estonia, and Belorussia, respectively; Valodzin also confi rms surges in the Soviet republics of Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Lithuania and Moldavia. 90 New routines of civilian policing of gay men appeared in the late 1950s and were solidifi ed during the 1960s, curated and occasionally enhanced by the KGB . The police in cities and towns monitored homosexual haunts in parks and public toilets, and used informants who were blackmailed with the threat of prosecution to incriminate others. 91 One intricately documented case from rural Estonia in 1966 (part of an extraordinary artists’ project incorporating historical and artistic methods) demonstrates that a single denunciation could trigger an extensive civilian police investigation running to 167 documents including interrogations, medical and psychiatric opinions, and prosecution reasoning. Collective farm chairman Juhan Ojaste, a Party member, was let off lightly for a fi rst offense – he was dismissed from his position but not arrested. Even with this blot on his biography, he was only given eighteen months’ jail time after a sex partner denounced him a few years later.92 Historians have not yet uncovered the offi cial policies adopted towards the gay male subculture in late Soviet cities. Such research would require needle-in-a- haystack searches for key discussions in Party, Komsomol, and city government archives, as well as unfettered access to police and KGB records. The Estonian historical project’s interviews with older gay men show that Tartu and Tallinn had lively cruising grounds where gay men met, made love, and forged friendships; the interviews give the impression police attention to these meeting spots was infrequent but fear of prosecution was 172 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI not forgotten. 93 Lipša’s archival study shows that from 1965, as part of all- USSR health ministry measures to control STI s, surveillance of homosexuals in Soviet Latvia was modernized, with queer men “registered in at least two fi ling systems”: a card-index of male homosexuals maintained by the Riga police, and another index of “spreaders of venereal diseases” run by Latvia’s republican STI treatment and monitoring center. 94 An ad hoc group of police and venereologists cross-referenced data on possible queer STI carriers whose names were then passed to police for monitoring or detention and medical treatment. A similar system with a police bureau monitoring homosexuals, both those reported by STI treatment clinics and those noted by surveillance of cruising spots, is said to have operated in Leningrad in the 1970s–80s, although we do not have archival confi rmation of its activity. 95 This report says that the KGB led “gay hunting” entrapment campaigns in the city, training civilian police and even setting up gay meeting spots in saunas in the 1980s to catch queers red-handed. Anecdotal sources for Ukraine and Siberia confi rm that as in Leningrad, police and KGB kept card- indexes of known homosexuals, and compelled young men to serve as informants to avoid prosecution; gay men got early release from imprisonment if they agreed to infi ltrate and denounce gay networks. 96 One Novosibirsk queer man, who served a total of eighteen years for homosexual offenses, recalled that “a special group of police assigned to gays” whose commander “got promoted on the backs of gays” ran in the city from the 1950s. He personally saw its card index with nicknames of male homosexuals and the usual biographical detail too. 97 During the late Soviet years, artists and intellectuals were prosecuted under the sodomy laws in cases that carried political signifi cance. The Soviet authorities used the sodomy law to harass these fi gures and destroy their reputations. As noted in Chapter 3, in 1959 the singer Vadim Kozin was arrested in a Khabarovsk hotel room with a young male informer while on tour with the Magadan Musical-Drama Theater.98 Kozin only served a few months in prison, but he interpreted this second conviction as a signal that the authorities would not allow him a free career, and indeed this would be the case until the late 1980s. Even after the end of the Soviet regime, Yeltsin’s democratic regime denied Kozin full rehabilitation. His friends campaigned unsuccessfully to have Kozin named a Merited Artist of the Russian Federation. His biographer Savchenko suggests that Ministry of Culture offi cials blocked the honor because of his criminal record, and that the KGB’s successor continued to view Kozin as a “ ‘natural pederast [who] perverts our youth!’.” 99 Director Sergei Paradzhanov, who like Kozin had already been convicted once in the 1940s for a homosexual offense, was imprisoned again in 1974 for homosexual acts. He was released in 1977 after foreign artists ambushed Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev at a public event, to plead for his freedom. 100 Another sentence on trumped-up charges, for bribery this time, followed in the early 1980s, again terminated early after international STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 173 campaigning. 101 Paradzhanov’s extravagant non-conformism, bisexuality, and refusal to work within ideological constraints imposed on Soviet fi lmmakers were the obvious reasons for this persecution. He left behind a body of prison writing, including letters, and a fi lm scenario, “Swan Lake. The Zone,” alluding to a guard’s love for an inmate. As James Steffen points out, after imprisonment, Paradzhanov’s notoriety as queer was inescapable, and his work in the 1980s with its fl aunting of “oriental” and exotic elements irritated nationalist critics determined to purge Georgian and Armenian cultures of non-heteronormative motifs.102 Another infamous case from this period involves the Leningrad poet Gennady Trifonov. From 1973 he worked in Lenfi lm Studios and was forced by blackmail to collaborate with the studio’s KGB minders; driven to desperation, he tried to emigrate and appealed to Heinrich Böll in Germany for assistance. The authorities took their revenge when plainclothes police dragged Trifonov off the street in Leningrad and beat him in spring 1976. Later that year, he was arrested and sentenced to four years under the anti- sodomy law. When international protests called for his release, the authorities responded by adding other charges to his case (hooliganism, giving alcohol to minors) to damage his reputation. Trifonov served the full four years in prison. On his release, Soviet authorities used administrative resources to punish him for his literary non-conformism and his open poetry about homosexuality. 103 Similarly, Lev S. Klein, an archaeologist with a dissident past, was arrested and held for eighteen months on sodomy charges. After his release, he was stripped of his academic degrees and career. He later refused to deny or admit a homosexual orientation, arguing that his sexuality was a private affair. 104 The author and drama teacher Evgeny Kharitonov was never arrested for his homosexuality, but he was interrogated by the KGB in the murder investigation of a gay friend; he died at the age of forty from a heart attack that was perhaps brought on by this incident. He was certainly under police surveillance and in danger of arrest. 105 In the 1970s, Trifonov and Kharitonov each penned underground manifestos, distributed in the West, defending homosexuality and criticizing its persecution in the USSR; in the run-up to the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Trifonov, then still in prison, was evidently penalized for this outrage with long confi nement in punishment cells.106 The same-sex relations of these intellectuals and artists served as a convenient pretext to arrest them. We lack confi rmation of how they came to be persecuted on the basis of their sexuality. As the Trifonov and Paradzhnov cases suggest, it was axiomatic that the cultural industries in late Soviet life labored under the gaze of KGB surveillance, and it is logical that the security police initiated these investigations. Yet the many thousands of ordinary gay and bisexual men who were arrested and convicted under the sodomy law were probably not so closely observed by the KGB . The collective farm chairman Ojaste was a Party member and his “spoilt biography” was known to the Communists; yet his convictions arose from routine police work and, 174 RUSSIAN HOMOPHOBIA FROM STALIN TO SOCHI it seems, denunciation from an aggrieved (or coerced?) sex partner. Many others, whose stories are unknown, probably were caught in the matrix of surveillance that was apparently curated by the KGB but run by urban sub- departments of the civilian police force, in tandem with STI clinics. The operation of these modern police and health-professional card-index, contact- tracing, and surveillance- and informant-systems merit further investigation, to understand more fully how and why ordinary victims of state-sponsored homophobia were identifi ed and persecuted. In Russia and in the West, LGBT communities commemorate the talented and educated victim of state oppression enthusiastically, but we tend to forget the ordinary, unexceptional victims of the same state oppression. 107

Towards a better historical understanding

To understand the use of political terror against lesbians and gay men in twentieth-century Russia requires more sophisticated thinking about the concept of homosexuality in the past. Also needed is a more empathetic attitude toward the objects of investigation. We need more “queer eyes” in the archives and less of the hostile, amateurish and badly informed analysis that we fi nd in the work of some who have had privileged access to secret documents, especially those of the FSB . Russian men and women who were persecuted for their same-sex inclinations were not alien from the rest of society. Homosexuality is not confi ned to a specifi c set of sexual acts, but had and has a far more important emotional and intellectual dimension. It is gross historical malpractice to read the archives of Soviet “homosexualism” solely through the policeman’s lens. The victims of Stalin’s anti-homosexual law were fellow citizens, and it does not take much imagination to infer that until 1934, Russia’s same-sex feeling people did not consider themselves a criminal element. Many, like the Leningrad “pederast” Lev Lisenko, arrested in August 1933, or Harry Whyte boldly writing to Stalin in the following year, believed themselves to be innocent biological variants of humanity, entitled to respect and dignity, and indeed “protection” in the world’s fi rst socialist society. Apart from empathy and more intelligent conceptualization of same-sex relations, historians and activists urgently need a rich and sophisticated account of the history of popular homophobia in Russia, Ukraine and the other societies of the USSR . “Homophobia” is a problematic concept to apply to past societies, but more work on the history of attitudes to same- sex love in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union is undeniably necessary. In part we need this work to understand the roots of the Stalinist political turn against male homosexuality. Upon what pre-existing social and cultural substrate did Stalin and the Communist Party build its modern homophobic sexual politics? We scarcely know. I believe we also need a historical account of popular Soviet homophobia to explain the long continuities we see in STALINIST HOMOPHOBIA AND THE “STUNTED ARCHIVE” 175 social attitudes in the former Soviet Union. In order to combat present-day hostility to LGBT citizenship, activists must be equipped to explain how Russian/Soviet prejudices were constructed and evolved, as part of a modern heteronormativity. Human rights activists also need more stories of individual persecution and endurance, to enrich a threadbare narrative and to inspire the next generation of young LGBT citizens and democrats of all sexualities. To understand better the fate of the victims of political terror or police persecution because of their sexual non-conformism, we also need a more detailed picture of techniques of power that the state used against homosexuals. There are many obstacles to research here, starting with the virtual inaccessibility of secret police archives and the incomprehension and active hostility of archivists and offi cials, even in archives that are open. A comparative approach, exploiting the differentiated archival regimes of peripheral post-Soviet states, would seem to be the most promising way to address this problem. Research collaboration between scholars in the Baltic Republics, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other non-Russian republics may allow us to enrich our sources on, and understanding of, the Soviet state’s persecution of sexual and gender dissent. Such a project would extend the reach of “queer eyes” in the archives by uniting disparate and often isolated scholars into a powerful team of investigators. More systematic and scholarly research on these and many related questions can be done with the will and resources. A clearer picture of how Stalinists and their heirs conducted political persecution against Soviet gay men and lesbians would be a powerful tool in the struggle for human rights. Without such research, an intelligent, well informed dialogue in post-Soviet societies on the question of the status of LGBT citizens cannot take place. 176